Disaggregated sovereignty refers to the need for broad strategic cooperation on critical issues requiring the ceding of sovereignty from several sovereign entities to new institutions without creating a centralized authority or "

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government ...

." Some people argue that this is the de facto situation of

global governance Global governance refers to institutions that coordinate the behavior of transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, resolve disputes, and alleviate collective action problems. Global governance broadly entails making, monitoring, and enforc ...

and actually more desirable than the creation of a single

world government World government is the concept of a single political authority with jurisdiction over all humanity. It is conceived in a variety of forms, from tyrannical to democratic, which reflects its wide array of proponents and detractors. A world gove ...

. The idea was first invoked in 2004 by the political theorist

Anne-Marie Slaughter Anne-Marie Slaughter (born September 27, 1958) is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and Interna ...

in her 2004 book, ''A New World Order'', which discussed the numerous, interwoven networks of national officials working together across borders on a variety of issues and threats, such as the coalition of nations that came together after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the G8 and

G20 The G20 or Group of Twenty is an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 countries and the European Union (EU). It works to address major issues related to the global economy, such as international financial stability, climate change mitigation ...

, and the environmental agencies of the US, Canada, and Mexico working within the

NAFTA The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA ; es, Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, TLCAN; french: Accord de libre-échange nord-américain, ALÉNA) was an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that crea ...

framework to create an environmental enforcement network. Slaughter provides other examples such as judges of one nation citing decisions from other countries in areas such as free speech, privacy rights, and bankruptcy. A common and imperfect analogy is often made to the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...

as an example of how states can cede sovereignty to create regional governance. Traditional concepts of sovereignty emphasize separation into territorially independent groups. Disaggregated sovereignty focuses on the mutual obligation and positive capacity to participate collectively through multiple institutions to address global and regional problems. Criticisms of the idea of disaggregated sovereignty note that an international legal patchwork creates a larger area for states to manipulate the balances of freedoms and responsibilities, particularly in regards to mass surveillance. The expansion of international law, instead, challenges the rule of law by creating so many overlapping laws that responsibilities can be shifted and disavowed.

References

Political ideologies Politics of the European Union Sovereignty {{government-stub